Vest Capital Copy Trading: The Full Setup, and Two Traps

Vest Capital sells futures evaluations, but it is not a futures venue. It is a perpetuals exchange wearing futures clothing, and that difference shows up in exactly two places during setup: what the instruments are called, and what a lot size means. Get those two wrong and you will either see a rejected order or, far worse, a filled order of a size you did not intend. This is the whole setup, both traps, and the part most people ask about first, which is whether any of it works if you trade from your phone.

Watch the setup first

Everything below is in this walkthrough, recorded against a real Trade Dispensary install and a real Vest Capital account. Captions are burned in, so it works with the sound off.

Vest is two products, and you need to know which one you bought

This is the single most common source of confusion, and it costs people an afternoon. Vest ships two platforms under one brand. They run on different APIs, they connect in completely different ways, and only one of them sells evaluations.

If you have bought an evaluation, you want Vest Capital, and you will never touch a wallet. Both appear as separate entries in the destination list, so picking the right one is the first thing you do and the last time you have to think about it.

We wrote separately about why perps stopped being a crypto product, which is the wider context for why a futures trader is looking at Vest at all.

What you can actually trade on a Vest Capital account

We pulled Vest's public, unauthenticated market list this morning. Vest Capital listed 88 markets, and 10 of those are named as futures contracts by Vest itself. These are the ones a futures trader will recognise, with the exact symbol the copier resolves to:

The remaining 78 markets are single stocks, ETFs, currency pairs and a handful of coins. There is no Dow, no DAX, no FTSE and no Nikkei anywhere on Vest. If your strategy trades YM or the German index, Vest is not a destination for it, and Trade Dispensary will tell you that by name rather than returning a symbol-not-found that reads like a typo.

Setting it up: three screens

Everything happens on the Accounts page. Nothing needs to be installed on the Vest side, and nothing is installed into your source platform beyond whatever bridge it already uses.

1. Add your source account

The source is the account you actually trade on, by hand or with a strategy. NinjaTrader, MetaTrader 5, TradingView, cTrader and Telegram signal channels all work, and the video uses NinjaTrader. This side is unchanged by Vest being the destination. If you already have a source configured for a futures prop firm, you can point a second copy rule at Vest without touching it.

2. Add the Vest destination

Choose Vest Capital from the account type list, give it a name you will recognise in a log line, and paste your refresh token. The token is in local storage on the Vest site and the form tells you exactly where to find it.

One thing to know before you do it, because it looks like a fault and is not: connecting a Vest Capital account signs you out of the Vest website, once. Presenting the token rotates it, the replacement cannot be written back into your browser, and so your browser session ends. You sign in again and that is the end of it. It happens on connection only and does not recur. Signing out of Vest afterwards does not revoke Trade Dispensary's access, because the v3 API has no revoke endpoint at all; what ends the connection is the token's roughly 30-day expiry, or removing the account in Trade Dispensary.

3. Create the copy rule

Source on the left, Vest destination on the right, sizing in the middle. The sizing number is the part that deserves a minute of attention, and it has a section of its own below. Once the rule is saved, new trades on the source copy automatically; positions that were already open when you set it up are not adopted, which is deliberate.

Trap 1: Vest does not call it NQ

Perps are named after the index they track rather than after the futures contract, so the Nasdaq is NDX-USD-PERP and the S&P is SPX-USD-PERP. Confusingly, Vest's own interface then displays those two as NQ-PERP and ES-PERP, so the friendly name you see on screen is not the symbol the API wants.

Trade Dispensary carries the aliases, so an MT5 strategy firing NAS100, a TradingView alert firing NQ and a Telegram signal saying US100 all resolve to the same Vest market without a hand-written mapping table. Gold arrives as XAUUSD, XAU, GOLD or GC and lands on GC-PERP.

What it deliberately does not do is guess when a ticker is genuinely ambiguous. On the 544-market perps DEX, three bare tickers name two different instruments each:

Those are Vest's own descriptions, read from its public market list. When a bare ticker resolves to two markets, the trade is stopped and both candidates are named, rather than resolved by a rule that has to be wrong for one of them. A filled order on the wrong instrument is worse than no order at all, and it is the kind of mistake you only find out about at the close.

Two related cases worth knowing. DOW on Vest is Dow Inc., the chemicals company, not the Dow Jones index, and there is no Dow index perp. And Vest quotes several currency pairs the other way up: it lists JPY-USD-PERP, the yen against the dollar, so buying USDJPY would mean selling that instrument. Matching it silently would reverse the trade, so those are refused too rather than filled backwards.

Trap 2: a multiplier of 1 is not one contract

This is the one that actually costs money, and it is not a Trade Dispensary quirk. Vest sizes in units of the underlying index, not in contracts. One unit is roughly one index point of exposure. So if you set a multiplier of 1 and trade one MNQ, you do not get the equivalent of one MNQ on Vest. You get a fraction of one.

The number you want is your contract's point value:

So one MNQ with a multiplier of 2 becomes two Vest units, and the dollar move per point matches. That is the arithmetic, and it is worth doing once on paper before you do it with an evaluation behind it. Start smaller than the equivalent, watch one full round trip, then scale.

Which sizing modes work on Vest, and which do not

Multiplier and Fixed both work. Multiplier scales whatever the source did; Fixed sends the same size every time regardless.

Risk percent of account does not work on a Vest destination, and this is a deliberate refusal rather than a missing feature. Sizing a position from a risk percentage means converting a price distance into a position size, which needs per-symbol contract size, tick value and lot step for the exact instrument being traded. MetaTrader 5 hands all of that over; Vest does not publish it. So rather than guess a size and produce a position of an unrelated magnitude on an account that was told it would risk two percent, Trade Dispensary skips the trade and logs why. Use Multiplier or Fixed on Vest.

Stops and targets are not placed on Vest. The order carries no bracket, so exits are managed from your source platform: when the source closes or partially closes, the close copies across. If you rely on automated bracket orders, keep them where the strategy lives. This matters more on a perp than on a futures contract, because there is no expiry to eventually resolve a forgotten position.

Trading from your phone: what actually runs where

This is the question we get most often about Vest, and the answer is better than people expect.

Trade Dispensary is a Windows application. It runs on a PC, and it needs to be running for a trade to copy. What it does not need is for you to be sitting at that PC. The copier listens to your source account, and your source account does not care which device placed the order.

So the working arrangement is this. You open the MetaTrader 5, NinjaTrader, cTrader or TradingView app on your phone and you trade the way you normally would. That order hits your source account. The PC at home sees it and places the corresponding order on your Vest account. You never open Trade Dispensary to place a trade. It is not a trading terminal, it is a listener.

The same is true of a Telegram signal channel. The signal arrives, the PC reads it, the Vest order goes out, and your phone was only ever the thing that happened to be in your hand.

Two practical consequences. The PC has to stay on and stay awake, which is why a good number of people run this on a small always-on mini PC rather than a laptop that sleeps. And because Vest never closes, an unattended setup keeps working at three in the morning, which is an argument for testing it properly rather than an argument against it.

Seeing the dashboard from your phone

If you want to check on the copier itself rather than just trade through it, Trade Dispensary has a built-in Tunnel Manager that exposes its dashboard on a public URL through ngrok or Pinggy Pro. It exists mainly so TradingView webhooks can reach a PC that sits behind a home router, but the same URL opens in a phone browser, which is the easiest way to glance at open positions and the copy log while you are out.

Pinggy Pro is the cheaper of the two at around $2.50 a month and gives a persistent URL that does not change; ngrok's paid plans start higher. The setup wizard walks through either one. One caution, stated plainly: a tunnel makes the dashboard reachable from the internet, so use your tunnel provider's own access controls on that URL rather than leaving it open, and treat it the way you would treat any other remote access to a machine that can place trades.

What to check before a funded account is behind it

The mistakes above all announce themselves on the first trade if you are watching. Run through this on an evaluation or a demo source first.

• One full round trip, not just an entry. Open, partially close, then close. Partials are where copy setups usually disagree.
• Check the size on Vest, in units, against what you expected. Not the source size, the destination size. This is where a wrong multiplier is visible in about four seconds.
• Fire the symbol your strategy actually sends. If your EA sends US100 rather than NQ, test with US100. Aliases are broad but the only test that counts is the string your platform really emits.
• Confirm the exit path. Because no bracket sits on Vest, satisfy yourself that closing on the source really does close on the destination, before you need it to.
• Leave it running overnight with no position open and check the connection is still alive in the morning. Tokens expire; better to learn the renewal rhythm on an evaluation.

Where Vest sits among the other destinations

Vest Capital is one of thirteen destination types Trade Dispensary can copy into, alongside TopstepX, generic ProjectX firms, MetaTrader 5, NinjaTrader, cTrader, Bybit, Propr on Hyperliquid, the Vest perps DEX, TradeLocker, Deepcharts and Breakout. They can all run at once from the same source, which is the reason most people end up here: one strategy, several accounts, one licence, no per-account monthly fee.

If Vest is new to you as a firm rather than as an exchange, it is listed on our supported prop firms page with the rest. And if you get stuck on either of the two traps above, ask us. They are the two we answer most, and we would rather answer them before the trade than after.